Gina and Vince Marsaglia: Pizza Port owners show pour business sense

Brother-and-sister team earn kudos for beers, generosity

Pizza Port is one of the nation’s top craft beer operations, but the Harvard Business School probably won’t teach its methods. That’s because they don’t make sense.

Over the past 23 years, Gina and Vince Marsaglia have built a chain of four Pizza Port brewpubs and one brewery, Port/Lost Abbey. Starting today, as the second annual San Diego Beer Week is celebrated with hundreds of dinners and tastings through Nov. 14, the Pizza Ports will be overshadowed by larger breweries such as Stone and Karl Strauss.

But the Marsaglias don’t mind. Their low-profile operations win plenty of attention in national and international competitions, where they routinely outshine their local rivals.

Or they would, if the Marsaglias had any rivalries.

Instead, this sister-and-brother team turns potential rivals into friends. In 1994, a Temecula homebrewer trying to turn pro turned to Vince. How could he adapt his small-batch India Pale Ale recipe to commercial scale?

Vince handed over the formula for Swami’s IPA, sharing one of Pizza Port’s most valuable trade secrets.

“I could have stolen that recipe,” marveled Vinnie Cilurzo, who went on to make award-winning IPAs at Blind Pig Brewery and now at Santa Rosa’s Russian River Brewing Co. “Of course, I didn’t. But Vince and Gina were so forthright with information and never worried about what I was going to do.”

With this recklessly trusting approach, you’d expect this chain to be riddled with weak links. But the Marsaglias, who won eight awards in April’s World Beer Cup and 13 medals in September’s Great American Beer Festival, continue to make friends and beers in their own improbable way.

Humoring Arthur

Gina and Vince grew up in a Colorado household — the youngest two of three children — with a notable lack of sibling rivalry. Vince is older, by 13 months, but then as now, he would seek out his sunny, even-tempered younger sister for advice.

In March 1987, when she found the Solana Beach pizza parlor that would become their first brewpub, Gina was a 23-year-old aerobics instructor and PE major at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Vince was a part-time chef and almost full-time ski bum in Colorado.

After buying out Pizza Port’s third partner, Gina and Vince focused on pizza. Beer was an afterthought — Vince feared turning parlors into brewpubs would ruin the family-friendly atmosphere — and the first brews were made in a lemonade container bought from Hot Dog on a Stick.

“Crazy beers,” Gina said. “They taste better now.”

Tomme Arthur assumed Solana Beach’s brewing chores in 1997, the same year Pizza Port Carlsbad opened. Around this time, the Marsaglias made two odd decisions.

First, the tiny company spent a small fortune sending staff to beer festivals across the country. Second, they humored Arthur.

“Everything he wanted to do, they’ve backed up,” said Tom Nickel, then Arthur’s assistant and now owner of O’Brien’s Pub in Kearny Mesa.

Arthur wanted to create sour beers with cherries and wild yeasts; unfiltered farmhouse ales; deep, spicy abbey ales. In 2006, the Marsaglias, Arthur and a fourth partner, Jim Comstock, opened Port/Lost Abbey in San Marcos. There, Arthur bottles his work — the brewpubs’ beers are only available on tap.